PROSEMINAR IN AMERICAN ART RACE AND REPRESENTATION SINCE THE CIVIL WAR Art History 565 (Spring 2012) Tuesdays, 4:00-­‐6:00 p.m., Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room 170 Professor Lauren Kroiz Office: Elvehjem Building, Room 212 Email: [email protected] Office Phone: 890-­‐3831 Office Hours: Wednesdays, 1:30-­‐3:30pm or by appointment COURSE DESCRIPTION This seminar focuses on the visualization of race in the United States from the end of the Civil War to the present day. Class sessions will be organized around various case studies, proceeding chronologically from nineteenth-­‐century Reconstruction to twenty-­‐first century identity politics. We will look closely at representations of diverse subjects made in diverse media, including sculptural monuments of slavery’s demise, Thomas Dewing’s tonalist paintings, baby albums, the art of the Harlem Renaissance, photographs of WWII Japanese American internment, and conceptual art by the collective ASCO. Drawing on critical theories of race and representation, in this course we will interrogate complex and sometimes vexing notions of race, ethnicity, visuality, visibility, authorship and identity in historical context. This is a discussion-­‐based class; each student will be required to analyze artworks and texts critically, present oral reports, and write a final research paper. COURSE OBJECTIVES Class sessions will be organized around case studies, so students will learn about particular figures and their works. However, the course will not be a comprehensive account or survey of art in the United States since the Civil War. Through focused readings and class discussions, students will instead learn a variety of important terminology, influential approaches, and interpretive frameworks to rigorously and thoughtfully explore how race and racialized content have been visualized in American art. Students will also gain expertise in conducting research, through an extensive project that will require them to engage with primary and secondary sources. Students should already be familiar with basic research tools, but will learn techniques of art history and the interpretation of works of art. COURSE REQUIREMENTS This course is designed as an upper-­‐level undergraduate seminar, intended for art history majors. I expect students in the class to have taken an introductory art history survey course and at least one other art history course. Students are expected to keep up with assigned readings and come to class prepared and willing to discuss them in relation to works of art. In addition, students will be required to write a paper that will be based on extensive research conducted outside of the classroom. The student’s grade will be based primarily on their class participation (which includes attendance as well as contributing to and leading class discussions), an oral presentation on their research (and responding to the presentations of others), and a research paper (including a series of progress reports). Art History 565 Syllabus, Spring 2012 Page 1 of 7
Reading and Discussion We will read a series of texts selected around chronically arranged case-­‐studies that will allow us to delve into some of the complex issues of race and representation in the United States since the Civil War. All of the assigned readings for the class will be available for downloading on our My-­‐UW page. Please complete the assigned reading for each week in advance of our course meeting and bring it with you to each class. In addition, to keep our discussions focused on visual representations, each week will have a Focus image (posted along with the readings on My-­‐UW). You should plan to spend 15 minutes before each class looking at and considering this image in light of your readings. We will discuss these images (and others) during our course meetings. Every week, two or three students will be charged with presenting the reading. Strategies of leading discussions vary; some students deliver formal presentations while others merely ask a few questions to stimulate scholarly conversation about the week’s reading. Leaders should be prepared to introduce the texts in five to ten minutes (for each text) and turn in a total of 5 preplanned conversation-­‐starting questions. Students will sign up for leading discussion on the first day of class. Progress Reports To help prepare for the presentations and the research paper, students will be required to report on their progress at several points in the semester. Some of these reports will be delivered orally to the class and graded as part of class participation; delivering your findings orally will allow your peers to give you feedback and potentially help you with any problems you are having. Most reports will be handed in to me, providing me an opportunity to help direct your research as it progresses. 1) The first written progress report (due February 14) will require you to hand in a preliminary bibliography based on your research findings; it should include NO LESS THAN 3 primary sources and NO LESS THAN 3 secondary sources. It should be annotated–that is you should provide brief (2-­‐3 sentence) summaries of each source’s content. Time will be set aside in class before the bibliography is due to discuss how one goes about developing a bibliography and how to properly annotate your references. 2) The second written progress report (due March 6) will require you to perform a formal analysis of a work of art (two to three pages in length) and briefly (in one paragraph) relate your analysis to one or more of the sources (primary or secondary) with which you will be working. 3) The third written progress report (due March 27) is a short (no more than two page) outline of what you will talk about in your presentation AND/OR what you will write about in your paper, including how you plan to illustrate it (with works of art). Although your outline may (and likely will) change throughout the course of writing, an outline is necessary before starting to write in order to help you frame your ideas and establish an organization for your argument. 4) The fourth, and final, written progress report will be due on the date of your in-­
class presentation. This progress report will consist of two parts: a short statement of two paragraphs on the findings that you will present to class and an abbreviated reference list noting the key sources you have used in preparation for your presentation (no more than 5 or 6). Art History 565 Syllabus, Spring 2012 Page 2 of 7
Presentations The last three weeks of the class will be devoted to presentations from each of you on your research topics. You will sign up for presentation dates on the first day of class. Each class presentation should run a15 minutes in length and will be followed by a question and answer session. You may talk from an outline or read a narrative–but you cannot go over the 15-­‐minute limit (as a general rule, 2 minutes per double spaced page at 12 point font). The best papers will have been practiced several times prior to their in class presentation. Final Research Paper The final research paper (between 12 and 15 pages, plus illustrations) is due on the last day of class (May 10); if you are presenting on the final day, you should hand in your paper NO LATER than Monday, May 14th at 5:00pm. Late papers are automatically docked ONE LETTER GRADE PER DAY they are late….no exceptions. Your paper is expected to be well-­‐
researched, well-­‐organized, and well-­‐written. It should be typed, free of typographic errors, and organized so that it logically fits together. You are expected to reference sources OUTSIDE of those discussed in class, and all your sources should be properly footnoted. The Professor is available for consultation prior to the deadline to help you develop a polished product. Distribution of Grading 20% Written progress report (5% for each of 4) 15% Oral presentation on research 40% Final (12 – 15 page) research paper 25% Participation (10% for leading discussion of readings, 15% for general participation and other assignments) Grading Scale: The grade scale will follow the University standards, but might vary in view of exam results: 94-­‐100, A; 89-­‐93, AB; 84-­‐88, B; 79-­‐83, BC; 74-­‐78, C; 65-­‐73, D, 64 and below, F. Grades are not rounded up. COMMUNICATIONS INFORMATION The Professor welcomes questions and is always eager to discuss any thoughts you have related to material covered in class. Please visit me during office hours or make an appointment if you have anything you wish to discuss. Use of Email I will reply to your emails as quickly as possible; sometimes it may take a day to get a response. The more clearly you can state your question the easier it will be for me to reply. I will not discuss issues relating to your performance in the course over email out of interests in security and because of the potential for misunderstanding. This includes requests to hand in a paper late. Please recognize that sending an e-­‐mail stating that you are handing in a paper late or will not be attending class DOES NOT constitute or imply acceptance on my part; gaining permission means discussing the issue together and reaching a mutually-­‐
accommodating solution. Classlists An email classlist has been set up for this course, which will allow me to send emails to you containing information that will help you succeed in the course. Please make sure your email is current with My-­‐UW. Art History 565 Syllabus, Spring 2012 Page 3 of 7
OTHER POLICIES AND IMPORTANT INFORMATION Attendance/Make-­up Policy Each student is expected to attend all class sessions. Grade penalties will begin after one absence and failure to attend class regularly will result in a failing grade. If you cannot attend class on the day an assignment is due, you must contact me before the class period you miss to discuss arrangements. No Exceptions! Serious grade penalties will be incurred should the student accrue numerous unexcused absences. Should you have to miss class, you should consult with me in advance to discuss arrangements. Per University policy: a grade of INCOMPLETE is granted by me ONLY when the student has carried the course with a passing grade until near the end of the term and then, because of serious illness or other dire circumstances beyond her/his control, has been unable to complete the course work. Academic Integrity Policy All work you do in this class must be your own. The two most common types of academic dishonesty are “cheating” and “plagiarism.” Cheating is the act of obtaining or attempting to obtain academic work through the use of dishonest, deceptive or fraudulent acts. Plagiarism is representing the work of someone else as one’s own and submitting it to fulfill academic requirements; this includes borrowing ideas, words, sentences or paragraphs from books and periodicals as well as from the Internet without properly citing your sources. If you commit an act of cheating or plagiarism, there are serious repercussions; on the consequences, please see the University of Wisconsin-­‐Madison Disciplinary Guidelines at http://students.wisc.edu/saja/misconduct/academic_misconduct.html IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT CITATION, COLLABORATION, OR WHAT CONSTITUTES ACADEMIC DISHONESTY AT ANY POINT IN THE SEMESTER, PLEASE ASK! Special Needs and Accommodations If you have special educational needs (i.e., trouble with timed written exams or with note-­‐
taking), you should register at the McBurney Center and contact me DURING THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF CLASS to make arrangements. Writing Center For help with your writing, you are encouraged to contact the Writing Center, 6171 Helen C. White Hall, tel. 263-­‐1992. In addition to one-­‐on-­‐one consultations, they also offer non-­‐
credit classes of one or a few sessions each, to help you with a range of writing issues. Seminar Room Rules There is no eating or drinking allowed in the Elvehjem Building, since crumbs and spills attract bugs and bugs are attracted to paintings. PLEASE DEPOSIT ANY FOOD REMAINS IN RECEPTACLES OUTSIDE THE BUILDING OR NEAR THE ENTRANCES. Please arrive to class on time. If you have to arrive late, leave early, or typically can’t make it through class without a bathroom break, please enter and or exit quietly and with minimal disruption. Switch off cell phones and other noisy electronic devices during class time. You may access your reading on your laptop, but please refrain from taking notes on your computer and/or typing /excessive “clicking” during our discussion time. Art History 565 Syllabus, Spring 2012 Page 4 of 7
TENTATIVE COURSE SCHEDULE AND ASSIGNMENTS * *Subject to change at Professor’s Discretion 1/24 Introduction 1/31 Uncovering the Invisible FOCUS: Chazen Museum experience George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sep., 1995): 369-­‐387. (republished in his 2006 book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness) Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 88-­‐103. 2/7 Slavery, Civil War, and the Public Monument FOCUS: John Quincy Adam’s Ward, The Freedman, 1863 Kirk Savage, “Molding Emancipation: John Quincy Adams Ward's ‘The Freedman’ and the Meaning of the Civil War” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, (2001): 26-­‐39+101. William Dean Howells, “The Question of Monuments,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1866): 646-­‐649. Renée Ater, “Commentaries: Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments,” American Art, Volume 24, Number 1 (Spring 2010): 20–3. 2/14 The Veil: Symbolizing Double Consciousness FIRST ASSIGNMENT DUE FOCUS: Henry O. Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Forethought,” “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” and “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.: 1903), vii-­‐viii, and 1-­‐
12. Judith Wilson, “Lifting the ‘Veil’: Henry O. Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson (1893) and The Thankful Poor (1894),” Contributions in Black Studies: Vol. 9, Article 4 (1992): 1-­‐24. 2/21 Vanishing Frontier, Vanishing Race (No class meeting – Visit the Historical Society Library’s Archive and Rare Book Collection – Details forthcoming) FOCUS: Edward S. Curtis, The Vanishing Race—Navajo, 1904 (published in The North American Indian, vol. 1, 1907). EMAIL ME YOUR ANALYSIS OF A CURTIS PHOTOGRAPH BY 2/22 at 5pm Shannon Egan, “‘Yet in a Primitive Condition’: Edward S. Curtis's North American Indian,” American Art, Volume 20, Number 3 (Fall 2006): 58–83. Theodore Roosevelt, “Foreword,” October, 1906 from Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian, vol. 1, 1907. Art History 565 Syllabus, Spring 2012 Page 5 of 7
2/28 Evolution and the Painting of Whiteness FOCUS: Thomas Dewing, Brocart de Venise, ca. 1905. Kathleen Pyne, “Evolutionary Typology and the American Woman in the Work of Thomas Dewing,” American Art, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Autumn 1993): 13-­‐29. Sadakichi Hartmann “Thomas W. Dewing” (The Art Critic, 1894), in Sadakichi Hartmann: Critical Modernist: Collected Art Writings, Jane Calhoun Weaver, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 237-­‐241. Richard Dyer, “The Matter of Whiteness,” Harlon Dalton, “Failing to See,” and bell hooks, “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, Paula S. Rothenberg, ed. (Worth Publishers, 2002), 9-­‐23. 3/6 Public or Private Images: Family Photography and Eugenics SECOND ASSIGNMENT DUE FOCUS: Your own baby picture (email to me by noon 3/6 or bring to class). Shawn Michelle Smith, “‘Baby’s Picture is Always Treasured’: Eugenics and the Reproduction of Whiteness in the Family Photograph Album,” American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 1999), 113-­‐
135. bell hooks, “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, Deborah Wallis, ed. (The New Press, 1994), 42-­‐53. 3/13 Harlem Renaissance FOCUS: Palmer Hayden, The Janitor Who Paints, ca. 1937/repainted after 1940. John Ott, “Labored Stereotypes: Palmer Hayden's The Janitor Who Paints,” American Art, Volume 22, Number 1 (Spring 2008): 102–15. Alaine Locke, “The African Legacy and the Negro Artist,” and “Palmer Hayden” in Exhibition of the Work of Negro Artists (New York: Harmon Foundation, 1931), 11-­‐12 and 43. Watch Harmon Foundation, A Study of Negro Artists, c. 1937, (first 15 minutes of 40 minute original, silent) available at http://www.archive.org/details/study_of_negro_artists 3/20 Looking at Lynching FOCUS: NAACP antilynching pamphlet, 1935, showing the lynching of Rubin Stacy, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Leon Litwack, “Hellhounds,” in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, James Allen et al., (Twin Palms Press, 2000), 8-­‐37. Amy Louise Wood, “We Wanted to Be Boosters and Not Knockers: Photography and Antilynching Activism,” Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-­1940 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 179-­‐221. Suggested (Optional on Reserve): Susan Sontag, selections from Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador, 2003), especially 40-­‐
58, 81-­‐103 and 117-­‐118. Art History 565 Syllabus, Spring 2012 Page 6 of 7
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1985), especially 27-­‐38. 3/27 Propaganda and Art: Imagining Japanese-­Americans during WWII THIRD ASSIGNMENT DUE FOCUS: Dorothea Lange, Children of the Weill public school, from the so-­called international settlement, shown in a flag pledge ceremony. Some of them are evacuees of Japanese ancestry who will be housed in War relocation authority centers for the duration, San Francisco, Calif., April 1942. Elena Tajima Creef, “The Representation of the Japanese American Body in the Documentary Photography of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Toyo Miyatake,” Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 13-­‐69. ShiPu Wang, "Japan against Japan: U.S. Propaganda and Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Identity Crisis," American Art, Spring 2008 (vol. 22, no. 1): 28-­‐51. 4/3 NO CLASS – SPRING BREAK 4/10 Chicano Identity / Artistic Identity FOCUS: Asco, Instant Mural, 1974 (Gronk and Patssi Valdez in the ASCO performance piece, photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr.) Chon A. Noriega, “‘Your Art Disgusts Me’: Early Asco, 1971-­‐1975,” Afterall 19 (Autumn/Winter 2008), 109-­‐121. Gloria Anzaldúla, “The New Mestiza Nation: A Multicultural Movement,” in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 203-­‐216. 4/17 Identity Politics and Postmodern Hybrids FOCUS: Hans Haacke, Photo Documentation of U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983 and Faith Ringgold, Street Story, 1985. Roberta Smith, “3 Museums Collaborate to Sum up a Decade,” New York Times, May 25, 1990, 2 pages. Nilda Peraza, Marcia Tucker, and Kinshasha Conwill, “Director’s Introduction: A Conversation” in The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (New York : Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art : New Museum of Contemporary Art : Studio Museum of Harlem, 1990), 9-­‐16. Homi K. Bhabha, “Postmodernism/Postcolonialism,” in Critical Terms for Art History, eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 435-­‐ 451. 4/24 Class Presentations 5/1 Class Presentations 5/8 Class Presentations Art History 565 Syllabus, Spring 2012 Page 7 of 7